People who have gotten their data from facebook have been posting representative samples around. The facebook app on Android gets everything, and uploads it. Years worth of calls, locations, everything.

If it's a hoax, it's a damn big one. I've seen any number of these.

To be safe, I'd recommend NEVER using this app. Better yet, delete it, or deactivate it if your OS won't let you delete it. And revoke all its permissions. You'd be amazed with what it comes configured to do.

Had it suddenly gotten out that the CIA had put code like this on millions of phones, users would be marching on Washington.

_________________We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

I do see a regulatory failure, but compounded by a cultural failure. Social scientists who understand the situation have warned about manipulation by advertisers and other propagandists since the 1930s. Not enough people had the cojones to confront those who say it's the normal functioning of commerce, or good business, or whatever.

_________________We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

As the post-Cambridge Analytica scandal fallout continues to unfold, some Facebook users are downloading their data from the social media platform and uncovering a surprise: Detailed phone records, including dates, times, call lengths, call recipients, and phone numbers.

It's only happening with people who use Android devices, and only when certain data approvals are granted. For example: I switched to the Android ecosystem several years ago, but there's no record of calls in my own Facebook data download.

That wasn't the case for Dylan McKay, a New Zealand-based programmer whose tweeted screenshot of Facebook's collected phone data went viral last week. A subsequent Ars Technica investigation revealed the Android connection.

When access is given, Facebook uses an Android phone's contact data to help guide its recommended friends feature. The company's Messenger app goes further, seeking permission to access call and text message logs on Android devices. Those aren't the only ways in, however.

As Ars discovered, in older, pre-Jelly Bean (v4.1) versions of Android, granting the Facebook app access to phone contacts also allowed it to access call and text logs. Later Android updates turned all of those into discrete permissions, but the change didn't affect Android apps that had already been given permission.

In other words, if you're a longtime Android user and you gave your Facebook app permission to look at your contacts prior to the release of Android 4.1 — which came out in 2012 — the app was able to keep looking at your call and text data. As Ars notes, Google formally started advising developers not to use the Android 4.0 API anymore in Oct. 2017.

As this news item started making the rounds on Sunday, Facebook published a "fact check" article explaining how call and text history logging is an opt-in feature in Messenger and Facebook Lite on Android. It doesn't address the fact that some older versions of the app were effectively grandfathered in to sharing data — which, to be clear, is a Google problem — but it does lay out how the two apps go about collecting data and what they do with it.

[snip][end]

It may or may not be affecting you, if you use the Facebook app on an Android device.

_________________-- Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.Malaclypse the Younger

The first place I go when these rumors spread is to the platforms themselves to see if their PR department said anything about it (with an eye to how defensive it is :p ). It's an old old old practice from my IT years, when every week somebody would be sending me one of those IT WILL EAT YOUR HARD DRIVE chain emails.

Fact Check: Your Call and SMS HistoryYou may have seen some recent reports that Facebook has been logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission.

This is not the case.

Uh-huh.

Quote:

Opt-in features in Facebook Lite and Messenger

Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provide you with a better experience across Facebook. People have to expressly agree to use this feature. If, at any time, they no longer wish to use this feature they can turn it off in settings, or here for Facebook Lite users, and all previously shared call and text history shared via that app is deleted. While we receive certain permissions from Android, uploading this information has always been opt-in only.

We introduced this feature for Android users a couple of years ago. Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with. This was first introduced in Messenger in 2015, and later offered as an option in Facebook Lite, a lightweight version of Facebook for Android.

Uh-huh.

Quote:

We never sell this data, and this feature does not collect the content of your text messages or calls

As Ars discovered, in older, pre-Jelly Bean (v4.1) versions of Android, granting the Facebook app access to phone contacts also allowed it to access call and text logs. Later Android updates turned all of those into discrete permissions, but the change didn't affect Android apps that had already been given permission.

In other words, if you're a longtime Android user and you gave your Facebook app permission to look at your contacts prior to the release of Android 4.1 — which came out in 2012 — the app was able to keep looking at your call and text data. As Ars notes, Google formally started advising developers not to use the Android 4.0 API anymore in Oct. 2017.

...

Android is up to 8.x, now. Jelly Bean is from like 2012. With 2 billion users, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of users with phones from 2012. But if a client came to me with this issue, honestly, I would tell them it's time for a new phone. Most PCs don't even last 6 years.

Android is up to 8.x, now. Jelly Bean is from like 2012. With 2 billion users, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of users with phones from 2012. But if a client came to me with this issue, honestly, I would tell them it's time for a new phone. Most PCs don't even last 6 years.

I use an Android phone, an older one my daughter quit using and gave to me. Thinking back to when we got it for her I suppose it's 6 years old. I don't have it hooked up to use as a phone though, I use it as little PC toy.

It's a handy little thing, it surfs the web. The GPS helped me find my property corners markers. It goes to the shop with me to be a repair manual, and order parts from rock auto.

It's a handy flashlight. A camera. The speakers are better than my laptop so it is nice for music videos. It has games on it so I can hand it to my son and that occupies him so I can drive.

My daughter says when it was new it would operate for 5 or 6 hours on a charge, it only operates for about an hour and a half now. I ordered a new battery for it this weekend, it was only $9.00.

It's everything a smartphone ought to be without being a phone. That's its best feature of all.

So I don't have this Facebook app which tracks Android calls and locations problem. I looked, my daughter didn't have that app on the old phone, so I'm pretty sure she's safe with her new phone too. Peace of mind, I'm safe from this awful boogieman. That boogieman can't find me.

I use an Android phone, an older one my daughter quit using and gave to me. Thinking back to when we got it for her I suppose it's 6 years old. I don't have it hooked up to use as a phone though, I use it as little PC toy.

It's a handy little thing, it surfs the web. The GPS helped me find my property corners markers. It goes to the shop with me to be a repair manual, and order parts from rock auto.

It's a handy flashlight. A camera. The speakers are better than my laptop so it is nice for music videos. It has games on it so I can hand it to my son and that occupies him so I can drive.

My daughter says when it was new it would operate for 5 or 6 hours on a charge, it only operates for about an hour and a half now. I ordered a new battery for it this weekend, it was only $9.00.

It's everything a smartphone ought to be without being a phone. That's its best feature of all.

So I don't have this Facebook app which tracks Android calls and locations problem. I looked, my daughter didn't have that app on the old phone, so I'm pretty sure she's safe with her new phone too. Peace of mind, I'm safe from this awful boogieman. That boogieman can't find me.

If you surf the Web at all, which you do, what you see online is chosen by algorithms which create your own personal hell based on every move you've ever made. It started out a lot more harmless than it is now, but the evolution was pretty fast and along lines that I could see (with my background) were coming from the usual agencies and consulting firms.

When facebook noticed I talked about politics a lot, I started getting political Google ads. I noticed that most of these were for conservative Republican candidates. I found this kind of lame, until I caught on that they weren't trying to get me to vote Republican. They were trying to get me to not vote.

There are other problems. Ads bring in scripts. I didn't use an ad blocker until one ad too many tried to hijack my browser or pop up a fake system message saying that something was dreadfully wrong with my computer, click here to fix it.

They've evolved way past that. Now they're into advanced psychological techniques which are designed to keep you off balance and uneasy about everything, therefore more receptive to snake-oil solutions. They capture everything they can in order to do this. It's advanced surveillance.

If I use the twitter app on my phone, it shows stuff all out of sequence even though I told it not to. Any tweet about drumpf being about to blow us up or send the Feds around for us goes right to the top, even if it's days old. I went and did their check, and all it said was that I seemed to be into cars. But F1 tweets don't go to the top. Scary ones do.

Twitter in a browser minds its own business. I get tweets in sequence.

That says a lot.

_________________We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

If you surf the Web at all, which you do, what you see online is chosen by algorithms which create your own personal hell based on every move you've ever made. It started out a lot more harmless than it is now, but the evolution was pretty fast and along lines that I could see (with my background) were coming from the usual agencies and consulting firms.

When facebook noticed I talked about politics a lot, I started getting political Google ads. I noticed that most of these were for conservative Republican candidates. I found this kind of lame, until I caught on that they weren't trying to get me to vote Republican. They were trying to get me to not vote.

There are other problems. Ads bring in scripts. I didn't use an ad blocker until one ad too many tried to hijack my browser or pop up a fake system message saying that something was dreadfully wrong with my computer, click here to fix it.

They've evolved way past that. Now they're into advanced psychological techniques which are designed to keep you off balance and uneasy about everything, therefore more receptive to snake-oil solutions. They capture everything they can in order to do this. It's advanced surveillance.

If I use the twitter app on my phone, it shows stuff all out of sequence even though I told it not to. Any tweet about drumpf being about to blow us up or send the Feds around for us goes right to the top, even if it's days old. I went and did their check, and all it said was that I seemed to be into cars. But F1 tweets don't go to the top. Scary ones do.

Twitter in a browser minds its own business. I get tweets in sequence.

That says a lot.

Yes this has been a big deal among Instagram users, who keep begging FB/Insta to go back to chronological feeds.

The recent redesign of Snapchat has earned the ire of Kylie Jenner, the cosmetics company Maybelline, and, most alarmingly, disgruntled teens. Among the youth’s many gripes with the app overhaul: friends’ private messages and public stories are no longer presented in separate, reverse-chronological lists. Instead, they’ve been jammed together on a single screen, arranged via a secret algorithm that Snapchat says “makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them.”

Because I am not a teen and have not been for several years, Snapchat’s interface has always been kind of confusing to me. But the redesign takes one of the app’s most straightforward aspects—here’s a sequential list of what your friends have been up to in the past 24 hours—and turns it into a jumbled mess for the sake of boosting engagement. “I hate how my chats are out of order due to the stories!!” wrote one of the 1.2 million people who have signed a Change.org petition asking Snapchat to roll back the changes. Others described the revamp as “so confusing I wanna cry,” “the worst thing since brexit,” and “butt.”

While angry users see Snapchat’s change as radical, the app is simply aligning closer with the norms of the modern, algorithmically driven internet. Twitter, which once ping-ponged between the mundane and the momentous in real time, now elevates popular tweets rather than the most recent ones. The “insta” in Instagram is increasingly a misnomer because high-engagement posts (likely from brands or celebrities) can crop up in a user’s feed when they are days old. And then there’s the grandaddy of all algorithmic feeds, Facebook, which created such a spectacularly addictive and profitable model that competitors couldn’t help but copy it.

These companies pitch their algorithms as a benefit to the user. How else, after all, would someone be able to see all the best posts or tweets or snaps by their hundreds of internet “friends”? But the notion that navigating the internet must be a machine-optimized experience that surfaces the “best” content is a new—and reductive—one. Before Facebook set out on a doomed quest to build the “perfect personalized newspaper,” people used RSS feeds and Google Reader to gather headlines from news sources they valued. Before Twitter rewarded political game-theory threads with mega-virality, people wrote on independent blogs (and had an easier path to monetization than “check out my SoundCloud” pleas appended to viral tweets). Before social media made screaming into the digital void commonplace, people used chat rooms and message boards to form more intimate, organized digital communities. These were the feeds of their time, they were typically organized chronologically, and no one was left weeping at their keyboard because they’d missed out on the best meme of the day.

I love that one!!!! (It's the one that sent a reply every time you said "communist" in a tweet, yes?)

I also like the Big Ben one which does nothing except tweet the appropriate number of BONGs on the hour (London time). With the real Big Ben down for maintenance, it's better than nothing.

That's why I'd hate to see bots gone altogether from twitter. Some of them are funny, and others do some neat things.

Botnets are more the problem. Twitter is too slow to respond when someone's code creates 1000 accounts in 30 seconds, and they all start agreeing with each other while disagreeing with you, sock puppet style. I get dire visions of millions of little CGI'd socks all running right at me while making squeaky little noises.

> the loss of chronological sense on the Internet

This is one reason I still like message boards. They still show posts in sequence, so I can make a coherent order out of them. I don't have some psychologically calculated algorithm devised by some high-powered Republican-leaning corporation shuffling everything up so I see all the buzzy ones first and conclude that everyone's finally just fricken lost it. And yes, I have some confidence that it's people doing the writing, not programs. Some right-leaning company funded by the usual suspects isn't making thousands of fake people who all agree with one another and disagree with me.

Then there's the whole spying thing. Maybe they collect the data for marketing insights, but we're now seeing that it's easy for people with more sinister motivations to steal it. Do we really want our every move logged and stored on some 21st century reality that looks more like 20th century dystopian SF? If the government got caught doing that, there'd be torches and pitchforks. Instead, we get, "I have nothing to hide."

Sometimes I find myself wishing that the Internet was still text-based and the hot browser was Lynx.

_________________We used to hang our traitors. Now we elect them to lead us.

I love that one!!!! (It's the one that sent a reply every time you said "communist" in a tweet, yes?)

I also like the Big Ben one which does nothing except tweet the appropriate number of BONGs on the hour (London time). With the real Big Ben down for maintenance, it's better than nothing.

That's why I'd hate to see bots gone altogether from twitter. Some of them are funny, and others do some neat things.

Botnets are more the problem. Twitter is too slow to respond when someone's code creates 1000 accounts in 30 seconds, and they all start agreeing with each other while disagreeing with you, sock puppet style. I get dire visions of millions of little CGI'd socks all running right at me while making squeaky little noises.

> the loss of chronological sense on the Internet

This is one reason I still like message boards. They still show posts in sequence, so I can make a coherent order out of them. I don't have some psychologically calculated algorithm devised by some high-powered Republican-leaning corporation shuffling everything up so I see all the buzzy ones first and conclude that everyone's finally just fricken lost it. And yes, I have some confidence that it's people doing the writing, not programs. Some right-leaning company funded by the usual suspects isn't making thousands of fake people who all agree with one another and disagree with me.

Then there's the whole spying thing. Maybe they collect the data for marketing insights, but we're now seeing that it's easy for people with more sinister motivations to steal it. Do we really want our every move logged and stored on some 21st century reality that looks more like 20th century dystopian SF? If the government got caught doing that, there'd be torches and pitchforks. Instead, we get, "I have nothing to hide."

Sometimes I find myself wishing that the Internet was still text-based and the hot browser was Lynx.

_________________Who are these...flag-sucking halfwits fleeced fooled by stupid little rich kids They speak for all that is cruel stupidThey are racists hate mongers I piss down the throats of these Nazis Im too old to worry whether they like it Fuck them.HST.

In a leaked memo, Facebook executive describes the consequences of its growth-at-all-costs mentality

A leaked memo from a Facebook executive has described the consequences of the company’s growth-at-all-costs mentality. BuzzFeed on Thursday published a June 2016 memo by Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who currently leads the company’s hardware division, in which Bosworth says he wants “to talk about the ugly” aspect of the company’s work.

just think...when it comes time to format robots with human-like traits, FB has all these personality's and traitsself exposed from all the humans who self exposed them all to FB.

one day you'll meet a robot who seems just like you. mm mm...warm fuzzies.

_________________Who are these...flag-sucking halfwits fleeced fooled by stupid little rich kids They speak for all that is cruel stupidThey are racists hate mongers I piss down the throats of these Nazis Im too old to worry whether they like it Fuck them.HST.

Serge Egelman, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif., built a website, AppCensus , where consumers can find privacy ratings for about 80,000 Android apps. He also built an app called Lumen that lets Android users see what all the apps on their devices are doing.

For instance, app developers and advertisers aren’t supposed to obtain the unique digital code that is programmed into every phone. This code could be used to track everything done on a phone for its entire lifetime. And since some apps also ask for a user’s name, those actions could be associated with a specific person. Imagine there’s a record somewhere of every time you’ve played “Angry Birds” at 3 p.m. when you were supposed to be working.

Under federal law, this kind of sensitive data is never to be downloaded from a device used by a child under age 13 without parental consent. But in a report last year, Egelman said that of the 5,000 apps specifically developed for children that he tested, more than half transmitted phone ID codes or other sensitive data that could help to identify the users without permission. This would appear to violate a federal law enacted in 2000 to protect the online privacy of children.

...

If you have an Android phone, a feature called Google Dashboard will show all the data the company collects about you. Launch the map feature, and you’ll find that Google has traced your travel routes for every day you’ve used an Android device. My data go back to 2012. Google knows about my trips to Las Vegas, to Chicago, to Africa, and to church. All of it. And, of course, Google has tracked your searches, every video you’ve watched on YouTube, every photo you’ve shot with the Android’s phone.

Google says it will delete this data on request. Facebook offers much the same option. But what about the thousands of app companies that collect similar information yet do not have the same standards — or come under the same scrutiny — as Facebook and Google?

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